NEWSOURCE21

Foreign Money, Political Networks, Religious Education and the Caliphate question Europe can No Longer Dismiss

Thom Aster

Europe has spent years arguing about Islam in terms so broad that the argument itself has become increasingly useless. At one extreme sits the proposition that ordinary Muslims constitute some homogeneous political bloc quietly working towards the replacement of European civilisation. At the other sits an equally complacent insistence that concern about organised political Islam is little more than prejudice dressed up as security policy. Neither position survives serious examination of what European governments, intelligence services, courts, charities regulators and the organisations themselves have actually put on the public record.

The evidence describes something more complicated, but scarcely more reassuring. Europe now hosts several distinct Islamist currents operating at the same time: organisations which explicitly advocate the eventual establishment of a caliphate; networks which European security agencies assess as pursuing political and societal influence through lawful institutions; foreign governments that have funded mosques, employed clerics or exported their preferred religious structures; educational organisations that have trained imams and religious cadres; and, separately, violent jihadist networks whose preferred route to political transformation is terrorism rather than gradual institutional change.

These currents are not controlled from a single headquarters. Turkey, Qatar, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates do not constitute an Islamist alliance and, in several cases, are rivals or outright enemies. The Muslim Brotherhood is not Islamic State. Hizb ut-Tahrir is not Diyanet. Iran’s revolutionary Shia establishment is not the Sunni Brotherhood. Conflating them produces a convenient conspiracy theory when the documented reality is more intricate: overlapping movements, conflicting foreign interests and competing interpretations of Islam, some of which nevertheless converge on the proposition that religion should ultimately exercise political authority over society.

Britain itself now makes that distinction explicitly. In its April 2026 social-cohesion strategy, the Government describes Islamism as a political ideology whose adherents seek, in differing forms, the imposition of their interpretation of Sharia through state power and, in its extremist manifestations, a global Islamist state. The same document makes an equally important qualification: Islamists do not represent Britain’s Muslim communities. That is not merely a useful caveat. It is essential to understanding what follows. The British Government’s April 2026 strategy

The caliphate is not an invented objective

The word caliphate has become so freighted with polemic that its appearance in European political discussion is often treated as evidence of exaggeration in itself. Yet there are organisations for which the objective is neither inferred nor attributed by hostile commentators.

Britain proscribed Hizb ut-Tahrir in January 2024. The Government’s current list of terrorist organisations describes it as an international Sunni Islamist political organisation with a presence in at least 32 countries and identifies its stated long-term objective as the unification of Muslims worldwide under a caliphate governed according to Islamic law. Britain concluded that the organisation met the statutory test for proscription because of its promotion and encouragement of terrorism, particularly following statements associated with the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks. The Home Office’s entry on Hizb ut-Tahrir

The Muslim Brotherhood requires more care because its national branches, associated organisations and sympathisers do not form a simple uniform organisation, and because many of its European milieus reject violence. Yet the historical political objective is equally difficult to pretend does not exist. The British Government’s extensive Muslim Brotherhood review found that the Brotherhood’s foundational writings called for the progressive religious transformation of individuals and Muslim societies, followed eventually by their political unification in a caliphate governed by Sharia. The same review described the movement as transnational, habitually secretive and deliberately opaque, while noting that different branches had adapted considerably to local political circumstances. The British Government’s Muslim Brotherhood review

That does not prove that every organisation accused of Brotherhood influence is secretly taking instructions from Cairo, Doha or Istanbul. Nor does it mean that every European activist shaped by Brotherhood political thought is planning the overthrow of a government. It establishes something narrower and more defensible: the political tradition under examination has always possessed a conception of Islam extending beyond private worship into law, society and government.

France’s 2025 investigation into the Brotherhood and political Islam makes much the same distinction. The report describes an ideological tradition adapted for life in Western democracies, often working through preaching, associations, education, professional networks and representative institutions rather than revolutionary violence. Its authors explicitly distinguish the phenomenon from Salafi-jihadism and acknowledge that the academic literature is deeply divided over how coherent and centrally directed the European Brotherhood milieu really is. France’s report on the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam

That uncertainty should not be disguised. It is precisely why the documentary record matters more than labels.

France mapped the institutional terrain

The French report is extraordinary less for any single accusation than for the breadth of the ecosystem it attempts to map. Its researchers conducted dozens of interviews with academics, Muslim representatives and administrators, undertook field visits in France and elsewhere in Europe, and examined the relationship between national associations, mosques, educational institutions and European-level organisations.

At the French level, the report counted 139 places of worship affiliated with Musulmans de France and another 68 considered close to it, distributed across 55 departments. Together they represented around seven per cent of the approximately 2,800 Muslim places of worship identified in the country, with an estimated 91,000 Friday worshippers. The significance lies not in pretending that every person entering one of those mosques is a political Islamist, but in the scale of the organisational infrastructure which French authorities believe developed around a particular current within French Islam. The section mapping Musulmans de France’s places of worship

The report then traces a European architecture through bodies concerned with theology, youth organisation, property, religious education and political representation. It describes the Council of European Muslims as an umbrella structure, identifies FEMYSO as its youth arm, discusses the Council for European Fatwa and Research as an important theological institution, and describes the British-registered Europe Trust as a financial vehicle supporting the movement’s European infrastructure.

Those descriptions are strongly contested. The Council of European Muslims’ formal response accused the French report of adopting a securitised, misleading and divisive interpretation of ordinary Muslim civic participation. It denied organisational or administrative subordination to Muslim Brotherhood organisations outside Europe and specifically rejected allegations made about its leadership. Its position is that participation in politics, public institutions and Muslim civil society is an exercise in European citizenship rather than a programme to Islamise European society.

That disagreement cannot simply be settled by repeating the accusation more loudly. The more revealing question is whether the institutional connections, financial relationships, personnel overlaps and educational materials described by governments can be established independently. In several important cases, they can.

Follow the property, not the rhetoric

The financial side of political Islam in Europe is often described as though fleets of Gulf couriers were still arriving with suitcases of money. Some of that picture belongs to an earlier period. Direct Gulf financing has faced greater scrutiny, regulatory changes and political pressure, and several European Islamist institutions have matured into organisations capable of generating their own income through property and investments.

Europe Trust is a useful example. It remains an active company and registered British charity. Its most recent Charity Commission figures show £1.38 million in income for the year ending December 2024, of which approximately £1.35 million came from investments, against £969,115 of expenditure. Europe Trust’s Charity Commission record

The French Government report goes considerably further, characterising Europe Trust as the financial arm of the European Brotherhood milieu and attributing to it a substantial property portfolio. That characterisation is an assessment of the French state rather than a British finding of unlawful conduct; Europe Trust itself remains lawfully registered in Britain and files its accounts. Nevertheless, the transition from dependence on external donations towards investment and property income matters. Once an ideological network accumulates capital assets, outside sponsorship ceases to be the only measure of its durability.

Historical foreign money is, however, beyond serious dispute.

A Dutch parliamentary investigation into unwanted foreign influence examined cases involving money from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Its most striking example was Rotterdam’s Essalam Mosque, which had received approximately €8 million in donations associated with Dubai’s Al Maktoum Foundation. A former mosque director told the inquiry that the foundation had exercised extensive practical control, including hiring staff, paying them and settling the institution’s bills. The same inquiry documented millions flowing from Kuwait-linked sources into other Dutch Islamic institutions and found that imams working in Dutch Diyanet mosques were employed and paid by the Turkish state. The Dutch parliamentary inquiry into foreign influence

This also resolves one claim which has circulated in various forms and which does not presently survive scrutiny: that the UAE is funding more than one hundred extremist imams throughout Europe. We have found no reliable evidence for that proposition.

There is a real UAE funding story, represented by cases such as Essalam, but contemporary Emirati foreign policy is strongly hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood. There is also a real European story involving roughly one hundred imams, but it belongs primarily to the Turkish-German DITIB transition rather than to an Emirati extremist programme. DITIB described plans to train around 100 religious officials annually, gradually replacing imams sent directly from Turkey, and in a later explanation said it had approximately 1,100 to 1,200 religious officials serving across Germany. DITIB’s account of its imam-training reforms

Correcting that claim does not weaken the wider investigation. It makes the foreign-influence question more precise. Turkey has operated a state-connected religious apparatus across Europe. Gulf institutions have financed individual mosques and organisations. Iran developed a separate Shia Islamist structure. Qatar appears repeatedly in historical Brotherhood financing. The UAE has financed Islamic infrastructure historically while becoming one of the Brotherhood’s chief regional opponents. These are competing power systems using religion in different ways, not components of a single geopolitical command structure.

Iran built its own European religious outpost

The clearest example of direct state-linked Islamist influence may have come not from the Brotherhood at all, but from Iran.

Germany banned the Islamic Centre Hamburg and its subordinate organisations in July 2024. Hamburg’s domestic intelligence authorities described the organisation as an important instrument through which Tehran sought to spread an antidemocratic and antisemitic interpretation of Iranian revolutionary ideology in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. A German administrative court had already upheld significant parts of the intelligence service’s assessment of the centre as extremist and controlled by Iran. Hamburg’s official account of the IZH prohibition

The case demonstrates why the phrase “Islamist network” can conceal as much as it reveals. Iran’s project is Shia, revolutionary and state-directed. Brotherhood-associated movements are overwhelmingly Sunni and politically distinct. Turkish religious influence follows yet another model. Their coexistence in Europe is evidence of multiple ideological and foreign-state pressures, not proof of a unified conspiracy.

The distinction becomes even more important when examining education.

What was being taught inside an imam-training institute

In September 2025, the French Government dissolved the Institut Européen des Sciences Humaines, or IESH, an institution established in 1990 to train imams, teachers, preachers and Muslim religious officials. According to the dissolution decree, IESH had been integrated into the French Brotherhood milieu through its leadership, teaching staff and relationships with other European Islamic institutions. The official French decree dissolving IESH

The importance of the case lies in what investigators said they actually found.

French authorities described internally produced course material and books available to students, including minors, which presented corporal punishment under religious law, severe inequality between men and women, the punishment of apostasy and a political conception of Sharia. Material discovered in a classroom used by minors presented secularism and democracy as hostile to Islam and placed Islamic religious principles above republican political principles.

The decree is even more explicit on Jews and Christians. It records educational material accusing Jews and Christians of corrupting divine revelation, using grotesque antisemitic language about Jews and describing an alleged collective Christian conspiracy against Islam. The state also said material used by the institute legitimised armed jihad and that other texts available through the institution promoted severe punishments for women, apostates and homosexuals. The section of the decree dealing with Jews, Christians and non-Muslims

These are not extracts from an anonymous Telegram channel presented by a political campaigner. They appear in the legal instrument by which the French state dissolved a religious educational institution whose stated purpose included the training of imams.

That still requires an important journalistic qualification. A government dissolution decree contains the state’s case. It is not proof that every IESH student accepted those teachings, nor that every graduate repeated them from a pulpit. The institution had submitted written observations during the dissolution procedure and had attempted to dissolve itself voluntarily before the Government proceeded with compulsory dissolution. What the document establishes is that French authorities found the materials sufficiently serious, and sufficiently connected to the institution’s teaching activities, to invoke statutory powers covering incitement to violence, discrimination and terrorism.

This is the closest answer yet to the question with which this investigation began: are Muslims being taught to hate Jews and Christians?

Some Muslims, in some educational environments, demonstrably have been exposed to material which authorities assess in precisely those terms. That finding cannot rationally be universalised to Muslims, Islam or Islamic education generally. It is nevertheless no longer credible to insist that the phenomenon itself is imaginary.

The children’s layer is much larger than one institute

France’s investigation also examined education beneath university and imam-training level. At the beginning of 2024, authorities counted 815 Qur’anic schools outside Paris and the overseas territories, serving 66,050 minors. The report said that more than one third operated within currents it classified as fundamentalist and that 114 were attached to the Brotherhood milieu. The French report’s section on Qur’anic schools and youth organisations

That number should not be abused. It does not mean 66,050 children were learning hatred, and association with a mosque or ideological current tells us little about what occurred in any individual classroom. It does establish the scale of a largely religious educational sector which national authorities themselves describe as opaque and unevenly supervised.

The obvious question is therefore not whether all Qur’anic schooling radicalises children. It is why the actual curricula, textbooks, reading lists and teacher-training materials of institutions identified as fundamentalist or Brotherhood-associated remain so difficult for outsiders to inspect.

IESH shows why that question cannot be dismissed as paranoia.

Institutional access reaches Brussels as well

The European Union appears in this story not because Brussels has adopted Islamist politics, but because organisations later questioned by national security authorities have successfully participated in the normal machinery of European civil society.

France’s report identifies FEMYSO as an important European youth organisation within the Brotherhood-associated milieu and describes its engagement with European institutions and political representatives. FEMYSO has repeatedly denied Brotherhood affiliation. European parliamentary records show that concerns over these relationships have generated formal questions about grants, meetings and institutional access.

The funding story is often exaggerated in political commentary. The European Commission stated in 2023 that FEMYSO had been a secondary beneficiary under European rights and education programmes but that those projects had ceased and the organisation was no longer receiving EU money directly or indirectly at that time. When the controversy re-emerged after the French report, the Commission said it applies financial-regulation checks and was aware of the French Government’s findings. The Commission’s earlier answer on FEMYSO funding

The important point is not the sensational claim that the European Union “funded the Brotherhood”, which goes beyond what the documentary record proves. It is that governments have repeatedly struggled to determine where ordinary Muslim representation ends and organised Islamist influence begins. If European states cannot agree on the classification of an organisation, the institutional machinery of grants, consultations, youth initiatives and stakeholder engagement will inevitably reflect that uncertainty.

Austria has just exposed the same problem inside deradicalisation

That difficulty has acquired an extraordinary contemporary example.

On 28 August 2026, Austria’s Directorate of State Protection and Intelligence announced that a fresh assessment had found indications of Muslim Brotherhood influence over DERAD, an organisation involved in the religious deradicalisation of convicted and former Islamist extremists. The Austrian Justice Ministry consequently ended its cooperation with DERAD, while the intelligence service moved to seek the organisation’s exclusion from Austria’s national network for extremism prevention and deradicalisation. Austria’s intelligence-service statement on DERAD

The significance is obvious. A body entrusted with helping governments rehabilitate Islamist offenders is now itself suspected by the domestic intelligence service of influence from a legalistic Islamist movement.

The allegation is also disputed in unusually forceful terms. DERAD chairman Moussa Al-Hassan Diaw called it nonsense, said the organisation had repeatedly warned authorities about the Brotherhood and noted that DERAD had itself trained security officials on the subject. Austrian public broadcaster ORF reported that there were no criminal allegations against the organisation. DERAD says approximately 800 people have passed through its programmes and that it currently works with around 200 present or former Islamists. DERAD’s response reported by ORF

That distinction should remain intact unless further evidence appears. What Austria has produced is a major intelligence assessment, not a criminal conviction.

Yet the case illuminates the central difficulty facing European governments. The contest is not confined to people standing outside parliament demanding a caliphate. It extends into the question of which Muslim organisations governments themselves recognise as partners, representatives, educators, prevention specialists and interlocutors.

Britain has its own transnational nodes

The British picture has changed again in 2026.

On 23 July, the US Treasury designated UK-based Mahmoud al-Abyari, describing him as a senior Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood official and Secretary-General of the Brotherhood’s General Secretariat. The Treasury alleged that he had supported fundraising connected to institutions sanctioned by Washington for Hamas ties and worked with Brotherhood groups to provide financial assistance to Hamas. The US Treasury’s July 2026 designation

Those are American sanctions findings, not a British criminal conviction. They should be reported as such. They nevertheless put a named senior figure within a transnational Brotherhood structure physically in the United Kingdom, bringing the abstract discussion of international networks considerably closer to home.

Britain also possesses a far less ambiguous street-level example in Anjem Choudary. In 2024 he was convicted of directing the proscribed organisation Al-Muhajiroun, membership of a terrorist organisation and encouraging support for one. He received a life sentence with a minimum term of 28 years. The Crown Prosecution Service account of Choudary’s conviction

Al-Muhajiroun and its successor identities show what the overtly revolutionary end of this spectrum can look like: public preaching, recruitment, repeated organisational rebranding and direct advocacy for an Islamic political order, eventually crossing clearly into terrorism law. It bears little organisational resemblance to the property-holding, lobbying and education networks examined elsewhere in this investigation. The ideological vocabularies sometimes overlap, while the methods differ profoundly.

European authorities increasingly recognise that distinction.

Political Islam and jihadism are separate problems

Belgian State Security’s reporting is particularly useful because it resists the temptation to collapse the Muslim Brotherhood into violent jihadism. Its 2024 intelligence report estimated that around one hundred people in Belgium were actively spreading Brotherhood ideology, while stating explicitly that the Brotherhood did not pose a violent threat in the country. The service nevertheless expressed concern that associated actors sought influence over public policy and Muslim representation and that the ideological environment could contribute to segregation, polarisation and radicalisation. Belgian State Security’s intelligence assessment

Jihadist terrorism sits further along an altogether different axis. Europol’s latest EU terrorism assessment recorded 45 terrorist attacks in the European Union during 2025, of which 24 were jihadist, together with 486 terrorism-related arrests, 347 connected to jihadism. Europol describes an increasingly decentralised model in which propaganda, personal grievance and fascination with violence can mobilise individuals or very small cells without the organisational structures once associated with terrorism. Europol’s 2026 EU terrorism report

That separation matters because an investigation which treats every conservative Muslim activist as a terrorist will understand neither terrorism nor political Islam. The question posed by legalistic Islamism is whether democratic institutions can be gradually reshaped by actors who themselves operate lawfully while rejecting important elements of liberal democracy. The jihadist question is whether people will murder civilians in pursuit of an Islamic political order. The security responses required for those problems are plainly different.

What the Muslim population itself thinks

Nor can institutional networks simply be projected onto millions of Muslims as though organisational affiliation and private belief were interchangeable.

A large 2025 IFOP study of more than 1,000 Muslims in metropolitan France produced results that deserve sober attention. Fifteen per cent of respondents favoured the full application of Sharia regardless of the country in which they lived, while another 31 per cent supported some application adapted to national law. Thirty-eight per cent said they approved at least some Islamist positions, although only eight per cent said they approved most of them. The survey also found particularly strong religiosity among younger Muslims. IFOP’s 2025 study of Islam and Islamism among French Muslims

Those figures are politically significant, but they do not yield the proposition that French Muslims collectively desire a caliphate. Almost half said Sharia had no role in non-Muslim countries, and individual answers varied considerably depending on what was being asked. Surveys of religious and political identity are also sensitive to wording, sampling and the difference between abstract approval and actual political behaviour.

What they do establish is that political Islam has a constituency which cannot simply be wished away, while remaining far from synonymous with the Muslim population itself.

So is there a global caliphate attempt?

After following this from ideology through governments, money, schools, lobbying organisations, imam training, intelligence assessments and convicted terrorists, the evidence still does not support the claim that one centrally directed global operation is orchestrating all of these developments.

There is no credible evidence of an international command centre coordinating the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Iran, Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Islamic State, Diyanet, European mosque associations and local Muslim organisations towards one common plan. The geopolitical contradictions alone make that impossible.

What does exist is more difficult for Europe’s political institutions to confront because it does not fit comfortably into a single security category. There are multiple Islamist projects, some revolutionary and some gradualist, which share the conviction that Islam possesses a political as well as religious order. Some explicitly seek a future caliphate. Some accept democratic participation as their method. Some operate through preaching and community institutions. Some exist inside foreign-state religious structures. A much smaller but lethal current embraces terrorism.

Europe has also allowed outside governments to finance mosques, employ clergy and influence religious infrastructure. At the same time, European institutions have sometimes engaged civil-society organisations whose place within Islamist networks is now openly disputed between governments, intelligence agencies and the organisations concerned.

Most Muslims living in Europe are not proved participants in any of this. Some Muslim communities have actively resisted foreign control of their institutions, while Muslim reformers, dissidents and ordinary believers are themselves among the people most threatened by Islamist coercion. Any reporting which turns those people into a collective suspect class serves the extremists better than it serves the truth.

The evidence nevertheless leaves Europe with questions that are becoming progressively harder to evade. Who trains the people who train imams? Who owns the buildings in which religious institutions operate? What books and curricula are being placed before children? Which foreign governments retain personnel, financial or doctrinal influence over European mosques? How are ostensibly independent European associations related through trustees, directors, property companies, educational bodies and historical leadership networks? And when organisations seek privileged access to government on the basis that they represent Muslim citizens, how diligently does the state establish whom they actually represent?

France found educational material attacking Jews and Christians inside an institution devoted to the formation of Muslim religious personnel. The Netherlands documented foreign foundations exercising control over mosque infrastructure. Germany dismantled an Iranian-linked centre it described as an instrument of Tehran’s revolutionary ideology. Britain has proscribed an organisation openly seeking a caliphate and imprisoned the director of another Islamist terrorist network. Belgium warns of legalistic Brotherhood influence while explicitly distinguishing it from violence. Austria has just severed relations with a deradicalisation organisation after its intelligence service alleged Brotherhood influence, an allegation the organisation vigorously denies. Europol, meanwhile, continues to describe jihadism as the European Union’s dominant terrorism threat.

Taken separately, each can be dismissed as a national controversy.

Taken together, they describe a political and religious landscape Europe has never fully mapped.

The next task is not to panic about Muslims. It is to stop pretending that Islamism becomes imaginary merely because describing it accurately is politically uncomfortable.